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Bullring was hailed as Europe's largest city centre, retail-led, urban renewal project when it opened in 2003. Laura Heywood finds out what changes have taken place over a turbulent decade.
Choked by the 'concrete collar' of Birmingham's elevated inner ring road, the Bullring of the 1990s was a soulless shopping centre plagued by vacant units and temporary stores, and characterised by ugly urban architecture.
Isolated from the rest of the city, the shopping centre had ceased being a place where locals chose to go, or big retailers chose to take space.
"Bullring was inhospitable and cold, aggressive in its design and brutal looking. People hadn't shopped in Birmingham for many years - it had been out of bounds to many for 10-to-15 years," recalls David Atkins, chief executive of retail property giant Hammerson which, in 1996, purchased the failing centre and 26-acre site.
Three years later in February 1999, the Birmingham Alliance was formed - a partnership between Hammerson, Land Securities and Henderson Global Investors - to carry out Europe's largest city centre regeneration project.
Despite the huge expense involved - the regeneration is thought to have cost in excess of £600m - Hammerson's aims were simple. "We wanted to extinguish all the negatives of the past and start again, and try to think ahead in terms of design, flexibility of the space and the way the scheme integrates with the city," Atkins says.
At the time, the bulk of retail property development was in out-of-town malls "that didn't have a community around them", according to Atkins, marking Bullring out as a different type of project. "It was the first truly transformational, large-scale regeneration project of a city centre. The building work linked [retail in] Birmingham back to the heart of the city and generally transformed the cityscape," Atkins says.
But with the centre so far from the thriving retail and leisure hub of London, Birmingham was unproven as a retail destination.
Getting anchor store Selfridges on board "set the tone" for other retailers to follow suit, according to Atkins, as Selfridges took 270,000 sq ft of space in one...